How do I terminate GNU parallel without killing running jobs?

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I'm running a bunch of shell scripts like parallel -a my_scripts bash and at some point I decided I've run enough of them and would like to stop spawning new jobs, and simply let all the existing jobs finish. Put another way, I want to kill the parent process without killing the children.

There seems to be ways of controlling termination when first launching GNU parallel (for example if I know in advance I only want to run x jobs, then I can use --halt now,success=x argument), but I couldn't find how to control GNU parallel when it is already running.

Sure I can just CTRL+C to kill parallel, and rerun the jobs that were aborted, but I thought there might be a smarter way.

gnu-parallel parallel-processing process linux bash
2 Answers

Small addition if you use parallel inside a simple script:
If you use parallel (<= 20190322) in a simple script.sh that looks something like this:

#!/bin/bash
cd $(dirname $0)

seq -w 0 $(($1-1)) | parallel -j+0 --progress ./something.exe {}

you can look up the PID of the child process of script.sh (using pgrep -P $scriptsh_pid) and then use

kill -TERM $child_process_pid

If I only run script.sh in my shell, killall -TERM perl also works.

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